BPC unveils Masa 2020 strategy

Botswana Power Corporation has this week unveiled its new transformation strategy dubbed, Masa 2020. The five-year strategy is a transformation journey to realise BPC’s vision of being “a leading power utility in the region” by 2020.

The strategy seeks to turn the corporation into a profitable and efficient entity by 2020. The five themes incorporated within the strategy are not limited to: Financial Turnaround, Service delivery, SHERQ culture, Organisational Efficiency and Service Power Supply.
BPC Board Chairman, Sebetlela Sebetlela revealed this week that they are awaiting the new CEO’s work plan on how he is going to take the organisation forward. The new CEO, Dr. Stephan Schwarzfischer took over at the Corporation this week from Jacob Raleru who has been with BPC for quite some time. The German national’s appointment comes as part of the transformational strategy to turn around the business operations of the Corporation.

He joins at a time when BPC is undergoing an internal restructuring which commenced in 2015 to improve efficiency and productivity. The Corporation is also grappling with inefficiencies at the Morupule B power plant. Sebetlela told Botswana Guardian that they do acknowledge that the previous efforts to turnaround BPC might have failed, however, under the new strategy they have designed systems to monitor the execution of the strategy. He said the strategy is aimed at closing down on challenges and opening up opportunities.

Some of the key focus areas under the new strategy are: execution and monitoring, well defined organisational structure, well-articulated management standards, effective internal alignment strategies, comprehensive change management initiatives, enforced consequence management and leadership management. Sebetlela acknowledged that these have been lacking in the past. “In some instances, the previous leadership did not document how to manage the roles. We have given a thought of how we want the strategy to work. We cannot give you guarantees that we would have achieved all this by 2020, but we are committed to deliver this. There is work to be done by management and the Board to convince our stakeholders that this strategy will work,” he said.

Pressed further, Sebetlela said “We will not spend time to find out how we got into this hole, however we will focus on the future; find how we are going to get out of this hole.” For his part, the new German CEO indicated that there is an opportunity to bring BPC into a better position. “I will not put anyone into failure for the wrongs that have happened in the past. We are not all perfect, however we need to work on things that were not worked on properly in the past,” emphasised Dr. Schwarzfischer. Dr. Schwarzfischer is scheduled to meet with the company management this week to familiarise himself with the company structures and operations.

He also said he hopes to meet the BPC Union leadership within the next ten days. BPC, one of the worst loss-making government parastatals revealed to Parliament Committee on Statutory Bodies and State Enterprises that, it is currently selling at a loss and is unable to even meet its production costs. The Corporation in early 2015 increased the household consumer tariffs by seven and half percent, while domestic users saw an increase of 10 percent. This was an aim to boost revenues for the cash-strapped Corporation.